Brother walks through front door after sisters take man they thought was him off life support

Updated: Fri 12:43 PM, Jun 14, 2019

CHICAGO (WBBM/CNN) – Two Chicago sisters made funeral arrangements for a man they thought was their deceased brother.

The sisters say the hospital did not properly identify the man. Police are searching for the man’s relatives.

The sisters had made a series of medical decisions for him in the hospital.

Then, they learned the dead man was not their brother at all.

Rosie Brooks said she got a phone call on May 13 that no one ever wants to receive.

"She identified herself as Jennifer, from Mercy Hospital, she was a social worker,” Brooks said. “She was looking for relatives of Alfonso Bennett and I told her, that was my brother. Well she said, he's here in ICU."

Brooks, rushed to Mercy with her sister, Brenda Bennett-Johnson.

"They had him on a ventilator and they had a tube in his mouth," Brooks said.

They both looked at the man in the hospital bed and said "I cannot identify this as my brother."

Alfonso Bennett, was alive and well, and had just walked through her front door.

"It's sad it happened like that,” said Bennett-Johnson. “If it was our brother and we had to go through that, that would have been a different thing. But we made all kinds of decisions on someone that wasn't our family."

The sisters said the man they'd been caring for was later identified at the morgue, through fingerprints.

They say police are now looking for his relatives.

"I can't conceive of how a budgetary issue would drive whether or not a person who was a John Doe would be fingerprinted before they're taken off of life support,” said family attorney Cannon Lambert. “If that's the situation, something's got to be done."

A spokesperson from the hospital said the family did positively identify the man as their brother.

Police reportedly do not take fingerprints unless someone commits a crime or when they go to the morgue.

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